Jules-Émile Planchon: The Botanist Who Named the Devastator

The man who identified the insect destroying Europe’s vineyards was not a wine scientist. He was a botanist who had spent his career naming plants — more than two thousand of them.

Jules-Émile Planchon (1823–1888) gave phylloxera its name and, with his American correspondent Charles Valentine Riley, established both what the enemy was and how to defeat it. He is one of the few scientists who can be said to have saved an entire industry.

A botanist first

Planchon was born on 21 March 1823 in Ganges, in the Hérault — deep in the wine country he would later help rescue. He took his doctorate at Montpellier in 1844, then worked at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew before teaching at Ghent and then Nancy. In 1853 he was brought back to Montpellier as a deputy in the science faculty, and taught there for the rest of his career.¹²

His output was prodigious: he is credited with publishing more than 2,000 botanical names. Among them is Actinidia chinensis — one of the species that gives us the kiwifruit (this one the golden-fleshed kind).¹ None of this had anything to do with wine. It simply meant that when the vines began dying, the Hérault happened to contain a world-class botanist.

July 1868

By 1868 the blight had been spreading for five years and no one could explain it. In July the Société centrale d’agriculture de l’Hérault appointed a three-man commission: the grower Gaston Bazille, the horticulturist Félix Sahut, and Planchon.³

They worked fast. Dying vines yielded nothing — the insects abandon roots as they collapse — but when the commission pulled up an apparently healthy vine beside the dead ones, the roots were covered in tiny yellow insects — spotted, by most accounts, by Sahut. The commission published the find as Rhizaphis vastatrix; after Victor Signoret proposed reassigning it, Planchon renamed it later in 1868 with the name that stuck: Phylloxera vastatrix, the devastator.³⁴

Being right was not enough

Identifying the insect and convincing France of it were different problems. A powerful body of opinion held that phylloxera was a symptom — that something else weakened the vines and the insects merely arrived to feed on the dying. The dispute ran for years.⁴

Planchon’s decisive move was to look abroad. He corresponded with Riley, the state entomologist of Missouri, who knew the insect in its American homeland and could confirm both its identity and the crucial fact that American vines lived with it. Riley began sending resistant American material to France from 1870 and crossed the Atlantic to meet Planchon in the early 1870s.⁵⁶ Planchon travelled to America himself in 1873 to see resistant vines growing in their native ground.

From that transatlantic exchange came the solution the industry still relies on: grafting European vines onto American roots. Planchon argued for it against fierce opposition from those who insisted chemical treatment would prevail, or that American roots would ruin French wine.⁴

Later years

Planchon left the science faculty in 1881 to head botany at Montpellier’s medical faculty, a post that included directing the botanical garden — the oldest in France. He died in Montpellier on 1 April 1888, as the replanting of France was well under way but far from finished.¹²

This day in wine history

• 21 March 1823 — Jules-Émile Planchon is born at Ganges in the Hérault.
• 1 April 1888 — Planchon dies at Montpellier, twenty years after naming the insect.

Read more

• Phylloxera: how one insect nearly ended wine
• Charles Valentine Riley: the American who helped save French wine
• Why almost every wine grape grows on American roots
• Birthdays in wine history

References

1. Jules Émile Planchon — dates, Montpellier career, botanical output (corroborated). ↩
2. wein.plus Lexicon, “Planchon Jules Émile.” ↩
3. Sorensen, Smith, Smith & Carton, “Charles V. Riley, France, and Phylloxera,” American Entomologist 54(3), 2008. ↩
4. Great French Wine Blight — the symptom-versus-cause dispute and the grafting debate (corroborated). ↩
5. National Agricultural Library, Charles Valentine Riley Collection. ↩
6. Gale, “Saving the vine from phylloxera,” in Sandler & Pinder (eds.), Wine: A Scientific Exploration, 2002. ↩

Want to read more? Try these books

Phylloxera Christy Campbell

Wine Grapes Robinson, Harding & Vouillamoz

The Story of Wine Hugh Johnson

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